Wulf's Book Reviews

What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions by Randall Munroe My rating: 2 of 5 stars Randall Munroe's “ What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions ” certainly has a clever premise, and I recognise its appeal to the science-curious. Drawing from his background as a physicist and former NASA roboticist, Munroe sets out to tackle (mostly) nonsensical questions with rigorous scientific logic. While that might sound fun in theory, in practice I found the book trying far too hard to be clever, and as a result, it came off as more smug than smart. Admittedly, some of the questions Munroe attempts to answer are genuinely imaginative, but his tone often feels too enamoured with its own geekiness. Rather than inviting the reader into a playful exploration, it too often felt like being caught in an endless lecture by someone who delights excessively in their own intellect. I couldn’t help but feel that the answers to these questions were...

The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls My rating: 3 of 5 stars I’ve had a hard time reading “ The Glass Castle ” by Jeannette Walls . Walls describes the horrors (and a few good times, few and far between) of her childhood and adolescence. While I kept wishing someone had intervened, I still felt thoroughly disengaged from the memoir. Walls describes everything without allowing any emotions to shine through. “Glass Castle” reads like it has been written by a detached observer. It’s a sterile, antiseptic report, which is undoubtedly well-written but, to me, not very interesting. Only during the very first chapter are there any meaningful emotional components and in her acknowledgements, Walls states being “grateful to my father, Rex S. Walls, for dreaming all those big dreams”. These are the dreams of a man who repeatedly tried to sell his own daughter to strangers to rape her. Moreover, he goes on to victim-blame her. Walls is also grateful to her mother “for believing in art and truth”...